Topic: investment

This working paper is part of WRI’s Climate Finance Series, which tackles a broad range of issues relevant to public donors, intermediaries, and recipients of climate finance. A subset of this series, including this working paper, examines how public funds can leverage private sector investment in climate-relevant projects to help meet developing countries’ significant investment needs. This paper maps climate-relevant investments of select multilateral agencies – the World Bank Group, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the Clean Technology Fund (CTF) – to identify trends in their investment practices. Subsequent working papers will map the activities of other public institutions. The aggregated findings will be synthesized into recommendations that inform the future public provision of climate finance with respect to leveraging private sector capital.

This document provides a glossary of financing instruments and the mechanism of these instruments. These definitions may serve as a useful reference for public sector decision-makers evaluating the broad toolkit of options available to support private sector climate change mitigation projects in developing countries.

These tables provide examples of donor government, development bank, research organization, and private sector efforts that examine how to use public climate finance to leverage private capital for climate change mitigation projects in developing countries. These tables are intended to illustrate, rather than exhaustively list, the range of research and convening initiatives focused on this topic. This document will periodically be updated as the landscape of such initiatives is dynamic and shifts periodically.

This document provides an array of relevant papers, publications, and resources that address: 1) Using Public Resources to Leverage Private Sector Participation; 2) Types of Public Financing Instruments and Mechanisms; and 3) Other Contextual Publications. These reading resources represent the current span of literature in climate finance as it relates to the private sector and can be reviewed to enhance one’s understanding of the nuanced opportunities and challenges presented by climate finance. This document will periodically be updated as organizations continue to publish in this space.

Targeting public finance to leverage private sector capital can help meet the several hundred billion dollars of annual low-carbon investment required in developing countries. This working paper serves as a primer, demonstrating how the public sector can employ different types of public financing instruments — whether loans, equity, or de-risking instruments — alongside policy and technical support to scale-up private sector investment in low-carbon markets.

This WRI/WBCSD publication is an information and decision-making tool to help customers develop their own sustainable procurement policies for wood and paper-based products. It also has information on existing approaches to procurement from legal and sustainable sources.